Globalising common sense: a Marxian-Gramscian (re-)vision of the politics of governance/resistance

Abstract

The impoverishment of mainstream International Relations (IR) scholarship, especially as it is practised in the bastions of academic power and respectability in the United States, can be registered in terms of its wilful and continuing conceptual blindness to mutually constitutive relations of governance/resistance at work in the production of global politics. This has been underscored in recent years by the rise of powerful transnational social movements seeking to reform or transform global capitalism, a coalition of coalitions recently reincarnated in the form of a global peace movement opposing the blatantly neo-imperial turn in US foreign policy. As the essays in this Special Issue attest, critical scholars of world politics have developed conceptual vocabularies with which to (re-)construct, from various analytical-political perspectives, aspects of these governance/resistance relations. My task in this article is to argue that – under historical circumstances of capitalist modernity – a dialectical understanding of class-based powers is necessary, if by no means sufficient, for understanding social powers more generally, and issues of global governance and resistance which implicate those powers. Although it is not without its tensions and limitations, I have found re-envisionings of Marxian political theory inspired by Western Marxism – and in particular by interpretations of Antonio Gramsci – to be enabling for such a project. Marxian theory provides critical leverage for understanding the structures and dynamics of capitalism, its integral if complex relationship to the modern form of state, the class-based powers it enables and the resistances these engender; and Gramsci's rich if eternally inchoate legacy suggests a conceptual vocabulary for a transformative politics in which a variety of anti-capitalist movements might coalesce in order to produce any number of future possible worlds whose very possibility is occluded by capitalism. In the present context of globalising capitalism and neo-imperialism, such resistance has taken the form of a transnational confluence of movements for global justice and peace.

Mining conflicts and transformative politics: A comparison of Intag (Ecuador) and Mount Ida (Turkey) environmental struggles

“….Sure, we are not worth anything, what matters is that they [the companies and the state authorities] fill their pockets.'' It appears that there are elements within the common sense (in the Gramscian sense) of the peasants that could be elaborated into a more profound critique of hegemonic practices and discourses (Rupert, 2003).…”

“…This idea is actually quite prevalent in Mount Ida as well. As Rupert (2003) argues, power has much to do with defining the limits of what is possible, and in both Intag and Ida the negation of the possibility of resisting the state is draining people's will to struggle. These observations demonstrate that the state's power to shape the actual experience of development processes, to promote a developmentalist ideology, and to preempt and repress resistance are essential in the making of subjectivities.…”

Counter-conducts in South Africa: Power, Government and Dissent at the World Summit

“…Whilst some contributors, such as Mark Rupert (2003), tended to re-affirm the fundamental division, or dialectic relationship, between governance and resistance, others decried the 'emerging, but increasingly facile, orthodoxy' that frames politics 'in terms of the simple opposition between governance and resistance' (Clark, 2003, p. 77). Yet, as Bice Maiguashca (2003, p. 17) noted in the introduction to this special issue, 'while recognising this overlap between the agents of governance and resistance, with the exception of Clark, all our authors either explicitly or implicitly accept the framing of world politics along these broad lines'.…”

The Deficits of Discourse in IPE: Turning Base Metal into Gold?

“…Production is only determining in the first instance in that it prevents some strategies and enables others. “Whether any such possibilities are realized, and in what particular ways, depends upon open‐ended political struggles in which the power relations of capitalism will necessarily be implicated” (Rupert 2003, 183). There are, in short, always several possible strategies from which social class forces, as bearers of both agency and structure, can choose (Bieler and Morton 2001, 16–29).…”